Climate Change Threatens Billions of Dollars in Infrastructure Investment in Developing World

9/7/2011

The effects of global warming infrastructure for energy, sanitation and agriculture reveal that current investment and development strategies will make poor nations poorer and accelerate species loss

Arlington, VA – While western Europe and North America ended
their period of rapid infrastructure development decades ago, developing
countries are now entering their own “golden era” of investment and
construction. While infrastructure for agriculture, cities, energy generation
and navigation are expanding rapidly, these countries are largely using planning
and design methods that will result in ineffective and ecologically destructive
projects due to the emerging and unpredictable climate conditions, argues a
paper published in the scientific journal PLoS Biology.

Entitled “Converging Currents in Climate-Relevant Conservation: Water,
Infrastructure, and Institutions,” the paper discusses how climate change
presents traps for both economic development and the conservation of species and
ecosystems.

“If we look at the Colorado River in North America, the policies and
infrastructure that govern a huge region of the US and Mexico were based on an
enormous hydrological error about the amount of water that would available in
the future – in the time we are living now. The infrastructure we’re building
worldwide right now is based on the same assumptions that we made back then. We
run a huge risk of making poor nations poorer and accelerating the decline of
species and ecosystems through bad development investments,” says John
Matthews, Director of Freshwater Climate Change at Conservation International
and lead author of the paper.

Massive structures like the Hoover dam, designed in the 1930s during a wetter
climate, now hold only about 30 percent of their designed capacity. Downstream
cities in Nevada, California, and Arizona and farmers in the US and Mexico have
invested assuming they would have the hydropower and water necessary to keep
growing economically. The gaps between the current climate and how much water
the region needs will only continue to grow. Unfortunately, the developed world
has exported the same kinds of policies and infrastructure design approaches to
the developing world. “These dams last a long time – decades, even centuries. So
approaches to infrastructure investment that ignore shifting climate conditions
are a time bomb. And they will explode during the lifetimes of our children and
grandchildren,” says Matthews.

According to the paper, a group of development banks calculated that most
developing countries spend between two and six percent of their GDP on
infrastructure development – a proportion which accounts for almost half of all
international financial institutions’ lending. Moreover, the Organization for
Economic Cooperation and Development estimated that about 40 percent of all
development investments are at risk due to climate change. Water-related
investments are especially critical. The World Bank invests about $10 billion in
water management globally alone. The United Nations has stated that humans will
experience most of the negative impacts through the lens of water – droughts,
floods, extreme storms, famines, and changes in disease transmission and
frequency. The same is true for nature: water is critical for both terrestrial
and freshwater ecosystems.

“The conservation community is in danger of becoming irrelevant if we don’t
engage with the groups that are making decisions that will affect ecosystems for
decades: the engineers and economists who design and finance water
infrastructure. Many of them are implementing plans that will rapidly get out of
sync with the climate,” said Bart Wickel, Senior Conservation Hydrologist at the
World Wildlife Fund, and co-author of the paper.

Sarah Freeman, Conservation Hydrologist at the World Wildlife Fund, and
co-author, added: “By integrating ecosystems into infrastructure we can deliver
the resources that will lift the developing world out of poverty and help to
minimize the impacts of climate change on the environment. People and species
have to adapt to climate change together.”

Poor investment and management decisions risk ecological transformations
caused by climate change, which in turn could trigger economic crises, the paper
argues, citing Rwanda as an example. That country faced a moment of truth in
2004: a drought threatened to cut off 90 percent of the country’s hydropower as
a result of the persistent destruction of wetlands for agriculture and energy
production. Rwanda’s leaders realized that sustainable water use was key to
helping the country develop a strong economy. Since 2004, Rwanda diversified its
energy production, restored wetlands, helped multiple sectors work together
around water, and changed agricultural policies to integrate wetlands
ecosystems.

The authors of the paper recommend a three-step process for conservation
science to provide a practical decision-making tool for funding, designing and
operating water infrastructure:• Consider alternatives to building new
infrastructure, particularly large ones.• Explicitly integrate ecosystems
into infrastructure development. • Reduce the vulnerability of the
infrastructure and its impacted ecosystems over the operational lifetime of the
project.

“Climate sustainable water resource management should be part of the
long-term strategy of the conservation community to help economies and
terrestrial and freshwater ecosystems to adjust to an uncertain future. Given
the risks for human communities and ecosystems from climate change, ecologists
working in the developing world need to think more like development economists,
and economists need to think more like ecologists,” the paper concluded.

Note to editors:Conservation International (CI) —
Building upon a strong foundation of science, partnership and field
demonstration, CI empowers societies to responsibly and sustainably care for
nature, our global biodiversity, for the long term well-being of people. Founded
in 1987, CI has headquarters in the Washington, DC area, and nearly 900
employees working in more than 30 countries on four continents, plus 1,000+
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